East Carolina University’s (ECU) data center had been experiencing two common problems: (a) explosive data growth, and (b) loooooong backup windows.
They continue to experience explosive data growth. Backups, however, have shrunk from 10 hours down to minutes.
Academically speaking, they realized that a huge percentage of their data was unchanging. Unchanging data is also known as fixed content. In order to reduce backup windows, ECU turned to the one storage system synonymous with fixed content.
Centera.
Rainfinity Integration
ECU’s storage capacity has grown to a whopping 450 terabytes! One of the bigger problems for ECU was the number of historical documents at the university. These documents were occupying a large portion of file system space on their primary storage, and backup times for these file systems were huge. Enter the RainFinity technology.
RainFinity presents the exact same file system interface to the university, while silenty and transparently moving the historical documents to Centera. Each large file on the primary store is replaced with a small file containing a Centera content address (CA). The size of the CA is on the order of bytes; the CA itself is a unique identifier that assists RainFinity in retrieving any file that has been migrated. Centera also uses the content address to guarantee that the file has not been changed or edited.
End result? Backups occur in minutes, and no longer contain terabytes of historical files.
Email Archiving and Legal Compliance
Another problem experienced at ECU was backing up the mailboxes of over 50,000 Microsoft Exchange users. Not only were backups taking 4-5 hours, but retrieval of specific email messages (e.g. for legal discovery purposes) would take days. Email is fixed content (hint: Centera can help). ECU implemented a policy where emails older than 90 days were archived to Centera.
This reduced the size of the production Exchange database (and the resulting backup times) by 50%. Additionally, e-mail discovery retrievals using Centera was reduced from days down to minutes (e.g. less than an hour).
Up Next: Medical Imaging
I have written in a previous post about Centera’s status as the ideal product for medical imaging. Medical images are currently taking up a huge amount of space on ECU’s production systems; plans are in the works to once again use RainFinity for the migration of medical images from production systems to the Centera.
Historical documents: fixed content.
Email: fixed content.
Medical images: fixed content.
Centera is becoming central to ECU’s data center for a variety of its applications; they doubled their Centera storage capacity this past spring. Capacity upgrade in a Centera is straightforward; Centera simply presents a set of IP ports. It does not require intensive and manual re-configuration during a capacity upgrade
I haven’t mentioned VMWARE
Hey, this is a Centera post! But explosive storage growth can lead to explosive server growth, and ECU deployed VMWARE to eliminate 156 servers ($1.8 million in savings) and reduced its power consumption by 660 megawatts per year.
Check out the full story here.
Steve
